The Evil In Sudan

Heads up: Some disturbing imagery in the above footage from Al Jazeera. Many more reports of escalating bloodshed are surfacing. Here's Eric Reeves last week:

Two weeks after Khartoum’s tanks, artillery, and military aircraft began moving into South Kordofan, violence—especially against civilians—continues to explode. There are now scores of reliable reports that attacks against the indigenous Nuba people have accelerated, both on the ground and from the air. Humanitarian conditions are deteriorating rapidly, aid workers are fleeing the region, essential relief supplies have been looted in the regional capital of Kadugli, and the U.N. World Food Programme has indicated that the violence could prevent it from reaching the 400,000 people it was serving before the recent onslaught. There are no verified estimates of the number of people displaced, but Abdel Aziz El Hilu, former governor of South Kordofan, has put the number at almost half a million. Dozens have been reported killed, but, in the absence of any effective humanitarian monitoring, this surely understates significantly.

It gets even worse:

The signature feature of Khartoum’s operation is the door-to-door roundup of Nuba, who are often summarily shot. The Nuba are also stopped at checkpoints grimly similar to those once seen in Rwanda. One aid worker who recently escaped from South Kordofan, told McClatchy, “Those [Nuba] coming in are saying, ‘Whenever they see you are a black person, they kill you.’”

Reeves isn't the only one seeing genocide as imminent. Here's Dan Morrison:

The 2005 peace deal that ended the civil war has led only to the imminent secession of the south. Southern Kordofan, a northern state whose residents largely supported the rebel cause, did not receive the right to self-determination. Instead, the state was given the sop of a "popular consultation" in which voters could express a desire for limited autonomy. Even that exercise never took place. For months now, the Nuba have felt Khartoum's noose slowly tightening. While the government claims it is justifiably squashing an armed rebellion, it has maintained a naked focus on ethnicity and religion, with distinct echoes of the jihad era.

What can only be called ethnic cleansing, when an ethnic group is targeted for extermination, started in Kadugli and Dilling while we were there. Door to door executions of completely innocent and defenseless civilians, often by throat cutting, by special internal security forces. We don’t know how many yet; hundreds seems for sure, but could be much worse. Terrible accounts of civilians – friends – attempting to find safety in the UNMIS (United Nations Missions of Sudan) compound being pulled out of vehicles and executed immediately.

Daniel Serwer advocates for Western diplomacy to resolve the issue. Khartoum has ominously pledged to continue fighting.